Basically all other coincidences can now retire and go home, because the all-time great has happened. It's already been mentioned in another thread, but it deserves its moment in the sun. On Friday 16th September, I posted this

when I'm watching F1 motor racing, the commentators might say that someone has done a lap within 0.2 seconds of someone else. And by that, they don't mean just anywhere between 0 and 0.2 seconds - they mean 0.2 seconds slower. And it might even be rounded down to 0.2 (the exact gap might be e.g. 0.213 seconds), so it's not actually within 0.2 seconds at all!

Then on Saturday 17th September, qualifying for the Singapore GP happened, and Daniel Ricciardo outqualified Max Verstappen by 0.213 seconds. This is already fucking amazing, right? But that's not it. On the Autosport forum, Pyrone89 posted this:

Good lap by RIC, average by Verstappen (but still within 2 tenths in a car that didn't suit him).

I was certainly impressed, although when you think about it the chance of a 0.213 gap between any 2 drivers isn't all that unlikely I suppose. Also, given that the average IQ on that forum is approximately 100 lower than this one (assuming Steven M McCann is no longer a member here), the chances of somebody claiming that 0.213 is within 0.2 are very high indeed.

Fred Mumford wrote:I was certainly impressed, although when you think about it the chance of a 0.213 gap between any 2 drivers isn't all that unlikely I suppose. Also, given that the average IQ on that forum is approximately 100 lower than this one (assuming Steven M McCann is no longer a member here), the chances of somebody claiming that 0.213 is within 0.2 are very high indeed.

Well, I don't think it's exactly confirmation bias - although maybe something along similar lines where you only notice certain things, and I was more likely to notice those forum posts having posted what I just did.

But if I searched for something similar in forum threads after qualifying for other races, I doubt I'd find anything.

But then obviously so many things happen to us over the course of each day that eventually stuff will come up that seems quite eerie. It would be freaky if it didn't! But then you could probably write off every coincidence ever that way. And one coincidence still has to win the Nobel prize for coincidences, and this is still the favourite.

Also, coincidences are always bigger to the person experiencing them than to anyone they tell. That's because the person they tell knows lots of people, so the chances of it happening to one of them is much greater than it happening to themselves. That's not a case of the person experiencing the coincidence being biased - it's just the way coincidences work. But anyway, since the original post was made on this forum before part 2 happened, it's actually a coincidence for everyone on here - not just me. So you should all be freaked out. This was the biggest coincidence ever.

I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be (not that I intend to disparage the rest of your post of course)? What if a woman (who had already had one or more kids) had a sex change and then went on unwittingly to impregnate one of his kids as a man, but then deliberately had another kid with his own child (in an incest-type scenario)? That's got to be pretty long odds, but I'm sure you lot can beat it, you degenerate scum.

I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be (not that I intend to disparage the rest of your post of course)? What if a woman (who had already had one or more kids) had a sex change and then went on unwittingly to impregnate one of his kids as a man, but then deliberately had another kid with his own child (in an incest-type scenario)? That's got to be pretty long odds, but I'm sure you lot can beat it, you degenerate scum.

I'm not sure I follow, particularly the bit in bold. How do you accidentally impregnate one of your kids without it being an incest-type scenario?

Sometimes I wonder if you could get a number (like pi or something but not necessarily pi) that should be irrational, but somehow ends up as rational by some sort of infinite coincidence. So instead of all the decimal places being like 458572101832907540932, after a certain point it just recurs, or basically ends and goes 00000000000000 forever. The numbers are still all effectively "random", but they're all 0.

JimBentley wrote:...What if a woman (who had already had one or more kids) had a sex change and then went on unwittingly to impregnate one of his kids as a man, but then had another kid with his own child (in an incest-type scenario)?

Gavin Chipper wrote:I'm not sure I follow, particularly the bit in bold. How do you accidentally impregnate one of your kids without it being an incest-type scenario?

I imagine that all the parties involved had received some sort of plastic surgery (beyond the sex changes and all that) and would have lost touch with one another, possibly as a result of their insane plastic surgery fetishes. So as they wouldn't recognise one another when they met. I think might make it work.

Sometimes I wonder if you could get a number (like pi or something but not necessarily pi) that should be irrational, but somehow ends up as rational by some sort of infinite coincidence. So instead of all the decimal places being like 458572101832907540932, after a certain point it just recurs, or basically ends and goes 00000000000000 forever. The numbers are still all effectively "random", but they're all 0.

I suspect a number like that would fail to fit the definition of irrational.

I remember in A-Level Physics and we had finished whatever bit we were doing that day, the teacher would talk about stuff like this. The bit I remember best is talking about the hypothetical possibility of there being some sort of relationship between the universal constants, like pi, e, root 2, c (as in the speed of light), etc. (as far as I recall, there wasn't, or if there was we'd definitely know about it by now). I know there's a relationship between some of them when you introduce imaginary numbers (that is, that i² = -1) but that's not really the same thing, is it? Fascinating subject, anyway.

I've only seen a few episodes of Seinfeld so I hadn't seen that previously. But then yesterday (less than 24 hours after you posted that), I went round my friend's flat and we watched a few episodes. And that episode came up!

And this was in no way contrived. Watching episodes of Seinfeld is what we generally do when I go round his flat and we've been watching them in order, so it wasn't hand-picked. We also hadn't had a Seinfeld session in quite a while before last night, so it was a bit strange that this came up the day after you posted this. It must be coincidence season. And also a coincidence about coincidences is pretty meta!

I have all the episodes on dvd and I have a dvd/vcr combo thing but the dvd tray mechanism is broken and won't open but the vcr is fine. So both of us have the means to watch each others copies but neither of us can watch our own. Coincidence?

Mark James wrote:I have all the episodes on dvd and I have a dvd/vcr combo thing but the dvd tray mechanism is broken and won't open but the vcr is fine. So both of us have the means to watch each others copies but neither of us can watch our own. Coincidence?

I think the obvious thing to do is for you to send me your DVD/VCR combo thing and I'll send you a working DVD player. Everyone wins! Especially the parcel carriers.

Gavin Chipper wrote:
Sometimes I wonder if you could get a number (like pi or something but not necessarily pi) that should be irrational, but somehow ends up as rational by some sort of infinite coincidence. So instead of all the decimal places being like 458572101832907540932, after a certain point it just recurs, or basically ends and goes 00000000000000 forever. The numbers are still all effectively "random", but they're all 0.

I suspect a number like that would fail to fit the definition of irrational.

Yep. Referring to the digits of a number as "random" is just a figure of speech, so shouldn't be confused with the other sense of random (i.e. unpredictable). If you could prove that the number in question was subject to this "infinite coincidence" then you would've proved that it's rational. So the statement "should be irrational" doesn't make much sense.

By the way, here's a fun method for calculating a specific digit of pi without having to calculate all the ones before it. (So if you've ever wondered what the 81,241,873,352nd digit of pi is, you can now find out.)

I've a feeling this one's apocryphal and even if it isn't, my memory of it is almost certainly a bit confused. But I'm posting it anyway because it's quite funny (in a dark way), if nothing else.

Apparently in the Wild West (of the USA obviously) gunfights (as in duels) were still quite the thing right up until about the 1890s or so (I'm unsure what happened then but they seemed to go out of fashion).

Anyway, towards the end of this period, these two guys were involved in one but neither was very good at doing it. One guy (I'll call him Guy 1 because I don't know his name) fired his bullet and missed spectacularly, firing his bullet into a tree (one of many in a nearby forest) and the other guy (Guy 2) just plain missed (eventual bullet location unknown). As was the custom of the time, this was deemed a draw and it ended there, so far as that gunfight was concerned.

At the time of the gunfight, these were two young gunslingers; in that era you could make a good living as a gunslinger by robbing banks, bars, trains and stuff, so a lot of youngsters took to it as a viable career. These two were only their early twenties at best and possibly younger.

But as the 20th Century approached, most of these dudes realised that they couldn't really sustain a good living by armed robbery and all that, so naturally moved into more respectable interests. Anwhow, so the story goes, Guy 2 had at some point secured a job as a demolition expert, as he knew all about blowing things up, usually with dynamite. Sometime in the 1930s, he got a contract to clear a particular area of land in order to make it a habitable area. The area of land to be cleared was mainly occupied by an old forest. More specifically, it was the forest besides which Guy 1 and Guy 2 did their (frankly poor quality) gunfight.

Guy 2 went about his business as usual, rigging up his dynamite charges strategically to effectively destroy the forest. It worked - after all, he was one of the best dynamiters in the business - but in doing so, the bullet that Guy 1 had fired in the gunfight (the one that missed and lodged itself in a tree) was somehow propelled by the explosion straight out of the tree into Guy 2's chest, killing him instantly.

So, Guy 1 won the gunfight, but it took forty-odd years. If true, this would be an amazing coincidence.

Sometimes I wonder if you could get a number (like pi or something but not necessarily pi) that should be irrational, but somehow ends up as rational by some sort of infinite coincidence. So instead of all the decimal places being like 458572101832907540932, after a certain point it just recurs, or basically ends and goes 00000000000000 forever. The numbers are still all effectively "random", but they're all 0.

The answer is something along the lines of 'it is possible, but with probability zero'. There are normal numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number) which more or less exhibit complete randomness to all number bases. If you were to generate a real number between 0 and 1 with an infinite sequence of 10-sided die rolls, then the likelihood of you generating a rational, algebraic (the solution of a polynomial with integer coefficients) or non-normal (i.e. non random) number is zero. This because, as subsets of [0,1], these sets have Lebesgue measure zero. Then it becomes a question more philosophical rather than mathematical as to whether 'with probability zero' is the same as 'impossible'.

I listen to a radio show where the DJ just continually reads out the most common words on Apterous.

Edit - Also after seeing a word that was printed on a nearby book that was also in the selection, which I don't think is deemed illegal, I decided to take this to its logical conclusions and get some wallpaper made that's just a printout of common Apterous words.

By the way, here's a fun method for calculating a specific digit of pi without having to calculate all the ones before it. (So if you've ever wondered what the 81,241,873,352nd digit of pi is, you can now find out.)

I still find this very odd. And it's not just the digits before but potentially many of the digits after that you'd think you'd have to know in some cases. You might have, say, a 5 followed by a million zeroes so it would take quite a lot of precision to know it's not a 4 followed by 9s. Weird stuff.

I was just listening to this on YouTube, and saw RIP comments below that were just a couple of minutes old. And this came up on BBC news. And no, I wasn't subtly influenced by his death in some way. I'd been meaning to look this song up for a while, and then did.

I was talking to my work colleagues about immersive cinema experiences and this came on my timeline http://dlsh.it/eJxSOTi
Someone must have read my mind cos I've always thought this idea would be good